Do game shows hire less intelligent contestants to save money

You know, they're not driving this trend, (unintelligible) make us dumber, but they're, you know, they're limited by what their viewing audience knows. They - these game shows only work because of play-along, because of someone sitting on the couch yelling out answers through a mouthful of Doritos.

Vivid, but not overly vivid, examples. The knowledge that it is often easier to fool people not with a total fabrication but by taking actual facts — say, “My mother hated Kevin Costner” — and mashing them up with invented details into ...

Because the show is dumb. It's just a guessing game that a small child could win at. Through DonD they managed to create a game show without any of that pesky thought or strategy that bogs down other game shows. It's a game show without a game.

I don’t know – it just seems like we live in a society where there are so many people out of work who need help – yet the people who are working never seem to think that could be them one day and maybe they should make a nice first impression while they’re in a good place. Maybe that candidate wasn’t really the recruiter’s target – maybe the recruiter wants to see if he knows of anybody like him who might be looking.

This is even given a spot of Lampshade Hanging in one episode, when a game show host killed off a competitor who was getting close to the top prize. He avoided having to do this before by only recruiting idiots. When the sidekick is confused how someone that smart got on the show, Sledge enlightens us with this line: "You see, he looks dumb, but turned out to be a genius, a trick I've used myself."

They said they deliberately make the qualifying questions much harder than what you see on the show because 1) they want to find people who are actually smart and not just lucky, and 2) people get kinda stupid when you put a TV camera on them.”...

You are so deserving!” and another who gets further in the game with lying than knowing facts by celebrating how well he’s doing despite how badly he’d perform in any other knowledge test. I’ll be honest: “Bullsh*t” is a lightweight spree if you can divorce the show from the context of the times in which we’re living – and plenty of people can and do. Want a daily wrap-up of all the news and commentary Salon has to offer?

What a lovely surprise and a great story for those contestants to tell for the rest of their lives. Yeah, it's a bit more complicated than that. Producers can't and wouldn't just grab anybody off the street — what if they were really shy on camera, or were too dumb to answer the questions, or didn't want to be on TV?

They often note that, without their own evidence, they have been swayed by what others say. They claim that they too have (somewhat) observed what other people claim is reason to vote someone out.